Nikolaus Geyrhalter (Austria)

Pripyat

To round out your PuSh Festival experience, we offer a selection of films inspired by, and intended to be paired with, performances and artists in the 2019 PuSh program. Here, in our partnership with VIFF, the darkened cinema matches the darkened theatre in illuminating and surprising ways.

A haunting, monochromatic vision of life in the not-entirely-abandoned radioactive “Workers’ City” of Pripyat more than a decade after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster of 1986, Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s film is akin to a documentary version of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker: a potent, patient meditation on a post-apocalyptic city which is gradually being reclaimed by nature and the handful of hold-outs who refuse to give up the ghost. Using long, still takes and interviews with four of the residents, Geyrhalter constructs a movie that is both concrete and abstract.